


The World was on Fire

by impertinences



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, Post-Season/Series 06, Twincest, mad queen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-05
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-09-28 12:48:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10101446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impertinences/pseuds/impertinences
Summary: The city is burnt. The Queen rises.[After the destruction, after Tommen’s funeral, after the coronation, the Lannister twins share a moment of realization.]





	

 

 

“The world is covered by our trails. Scars we cover up with paint.”

“Did you think the lion was sleeping because he didn’t roar?”

 

 

 

Jaime has seen fires burn. In camps, they smolder like beacons of hope and life. In war, they destroy and trap. He knows how quick fire can turn from offering protection to causing destruction, as he knows the more sinister evil of wildfire and its insidious, uncontrollable path.

Cersei takes the throne. His sister sits as a statue, cold in her marble bearing, and he turns his eyes away from the blinding threat of her. Beyond the pain, the thrill, and the sudden, sharp stab of fear slicing through his ceremonial armor, he tastes ash. He smells char.

The city is burnt. The Queen rises.

 

 

 

 

There is destruction and Tommen’s funeral and the coronation. The days are cast in confusion and hurt.

In a throne room built from greed and lies, they are alone. The Mountain guards the doors from the outside with his otherworldly frame. The silence in the air settles like the dust from so many burnt bodies. There are words he could say, thoughts he could speak, but he says nothing. He has no more quips, no more sarcasm.

Still seated on the Iron Throne, Cersei looks formidable and impressive. She has wrapped herself in black leather, a shroud and armor both, for days. Her dresses stop, sharp, at her ankles. She shows her feet – the ones that carried her, steady and stern, from the high sparrow’s holy pit to the protection of the Red Keep – and so she shows her strength. She is in the same fashion now, as though this private moment between siblings cannot change her need to harden herself.

Now, more than ever, Jaime thinks they look the least alike.

He is beside but below her, seated on the closest top tier of step. Cersei moves before she speaks, reaching, curling her fingers around her brother’s golden hand in a clasp that he cannot identify. Is it affection? Is it need? Is it strategic? He used to be able to tell. The hand she clutches is cold. She could have reached for any other part of him and felt warmth, but she didn’t.

“The King is dead,” she says, and this is her at her most severe – soft, without malice, a pure shot of steel as undercurrent.

“Cersei-”

“All of the Kings. However fierce and proud they were, or however weak. All gone.” For a moment, he thinks she is telling him of her pain, that she has stopped his own words so that they might share this moment like they had shared their knowledge and intuition as children. “It is a time of Queens now.”

There’s something with her mouth, the hint of a smile, that scares him.

She should be crying. She is a mother, even if she is royalty. Cersei knows he thinks so. But she has mourned her sons and daughter as she has mourned her father – privately, with a few delicate tears that threaten to spill into her wine. They have no more children to hide, her eyes tell him now. They have no more heirs whose lineage require sacrifice. The only chains binding her today are the ones on her bodice, silver links of symbolic armor. What more can the world do, her wardrobe and stiff spine ask. It is the world that has made her barren, left her with bitterness and the heavier, more palpable weight of power.

The deadly, full resolution of its cost.

Unlike her predecessors, she has inherited the throne with nothing more to lose. But Jaime wishes she had more to sacrifice if only because he misses her softness. He misses her gowns of crushed velvet, the delicate stitching showcasing the colors of their house, her long hair and how it had caught the light. He misses her laughter, however rare it had been, and the way she had whispered stories to their children in the early darkness of night. He had fought free from the Starks for that laughter, for the sister in gold and red, for the mother with a lioness’s heart.

“You are the only Queen,” he tells her, lifting his eyes to the crown upon her head. “Long may you reign.”

She smiles at him in a way that shows her disappointment – even his flattery is perceived as naivety. She touches the curve of her crown slowly, still unaccustomed to its presence. The lion sigil is silver, but everything else is sharp, as twisted and painful to wear as it is to sit on the Throne itself. It reminds her of her enemies and her grief. “There will always be others.”

Cersei has heard the news from across the seas, the threat from the Mother of Dragons whose rise from her husband’s funeral ashes is layered in mysticism. She thinks her own ascendance as equally unlikely and painful. She too has become a Queen out of betrayal, out of death, out of loss. She too has forged herself from ruin.

When Jaime leans up and raises his real hand to touch her cheek, a gentle sweep of his calloused, warm fingers near her jaw, she turns her face away.

She wants to be beyond such connections now.

But she keeps gripping his golden hand.

 

 

 

 

Aerys, King Scab, had been blind with madness, so Jaime had drove his sword through his heart.

For his charity, the Kingdom called him Kingslayer.

Kingslayer, they cried.

Kingslayer, they mocked.

For more than seventeen years he has been a traitor, and he has worn his shame in the secret pit inside of him where he keeps his honor and his heart. The confession he provided Brienne had lifted some of the shadow around his history, but it would never be enough. The world had decreed him a villain.

Now, he does not know if he has the strength to wield his sword again. Once, when he had been the strongest and best, when he had been golden in beauty rather than limb, when life was less about corruption and more about temptation, he had been able to carry the weight of duty. It had not been easy.

Cersei is a Lannister. Cersei is his Queen, but she is first his sister, his twin, his equal in flesh and heart. To condemn her is to condemn himself, his blood tells him.

(His mind says maybe they deserve it. Even their crimes are similar in the end.)

He thinks of how they came into the world, crying and wet, pink-infant flesh so vulnerable, tiny bodies incapable of causing pain. Nobody had bowed to them then although their name had demanded respect. He had been the prize, clawed lion of Lannister, capable of shouldering his father’s expectations. Cersei had been a prize of a different kind – a gift to the highest, finest bidder. She had curtsied and dipped for many, only to become a Queen who bended her knees to Robert’s drunken urges. Gradually, they had lost their vulnerability, lost their softness, shown their secrets only to one another and bared their most tender of spots in the safety of shadows.

Seven Kingdoms will bow now, deeper and lower, than ever before – the last of the wolves, the foxes, the sea beasts, the birds in the sky, the flowers on the vine.

He does not know what she will do to those who will refuse.

He does not recognize her sounds anymore or the weight of her eyes or the touch of her hand.

He does not know if her fire can match that of a dragon’s.

 

 

 

 

“What can I do?” he asks.

“What will you do?”

He smiles, a half-twist of his mouth at the corner. When she stands, he does not ask. He takes – a quick pull of her slim body against hers, catching her mouth. She opens to him, all dry heat and soft lips with sharp teeth that his tongue traces. He grasps her face with his good hand. She fists the collar of his shirt.

This too is a crime they share.

He wants their penitence. She wants their ascension.

He wants fires of hope, and she wants to see the world burn.

 

 

 


End file.
